DVD / Blu-ray New Releases: December 10, 2013: SAVING GENERAL YANG

The story of the legendary Chinese General Yang gets another twist in Well Go USA’s Saving General Yang. Set in the early Song Dynasty 986 A.D., the epic follows the seven sons of the Yang family’s battle to rescue their father from the clutches of the Khitan army. Under the leadership of the oldest son, the brothers set out with a small group of warriors through the dangerous Wolf Mountains to face down an army of thousands and bring their father back home alive. Ronny Yu’s 102 minute action piece features original Mandarin dialogue with available English dubbing and English, Spanish, and French subtitles.

Also from Well Go USA, The Rooftop (2013) darts along the roofs of Galilee with Gao and his friends. They are happy carefree children that sing and dance beneath the stars as they scramble to survive. One day Wax/Gao meets the girl of his dreams: a beauty from a billboard. Will she fall for a street urchin or will their different backgrounds keep them apart? Taiwanese music star Jay Chou directed, produced, wrote, and stars in this happy tale; he even wrote the score to this Bollywoodesque musical.

From happy-go-lucky The Rooftop, we switch gears to a decidedly more somber Danish film, The Hunt. Thomas Vinterburg crafts a reserved and cautious story of a kindergarten teacher who is falsely accused of molestation by the daughter of his best friend in his small ancestral town. Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen) has just started putting his homelife back together following a bitter divorce. His teenaged son Marcus (Lasse Fogelstrøm) has come to live with him, and he looks forward to shepherding him into manhood. Step by step the accusations chip away at the life he has built. His relationship with Nadja (Alexandra Rapaport), a custodian at the school, suffers when she cannot get past the possibility of his guilt. He is turned away from stores and shunned by his neighbors. The number of accusations mount with the overzealous encouragement of investigators and misguided coaching by parents of the schoolchildren.

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